Philosophy 33

So you are going to take Philosophy 33. Here is what you need to know.

Philosophy 33 (Comparative Survey of World Religions) used to be numbered Philosophy 23, and its title was slightly different from what it is now. It is the same course, however, and it usually satisfies your humanities requirement for transfer (it is articulated as equivalent to Religious Studies 150 at CSUN) . It is also a course that meets the cross-cultural requirement for graduation at Mission College.

This is a survey course. It has these objectives:

learn some key facts about major religious traditions
understand the distinction between spirituality and institutional religion
develop a better appreciation of the importance of religion in both defining and expressing cultural values

We focus on a limited number of major traditions: Hinduism and Buddhism from India; Confucianism and Daoism from China; Judaism, Christianity and Islam (the Abrahamic religions) from the Mideast. Your text has material on still more, and we will look briefly at indigenous or tribal traditions and at some of the current movements.

A first question is whether this is a course for believers or for nonbelievers. My answer is that it is a course for both. One restriction, necessary since Mission College is a tax-supported institution, is that it discusses different religions but does not in any way attempt to promote a specific religious view. For this reason, I insist that preaching and proselytizing not be part of the discussions we have.

The amount of detail that can be found in many of the textbooks used in courses of this kind is overwhelming. A good way of approaching the class is to see it as offering a series of spiral staircases. The higher you climb the more you can see around you. You will have to climb a certain height just to satisfy the requirements for the course, but there is no limit on how high you may climb on your own.

One thing I will recommend is setting up a notebook for each section and then taking good notes from both the text and from the Internet materials (including things I will have posted for you either on the Web or through email). When you come to doing a paper for the course, you will have a chance to specialize in one one tradition or to consider one theme that is present in several traditions.

Above all, do take part in our discussions that will be set up. I am available through email at your convenience for any questions or comments.

A final note does have to be this: plagiarism (presenting something as your own work that you did not do yourself) is a serious academic sin. I will contact you about work that seems not to be original, and you would risk losing credit for that assignment if you are unable to defend youself adequately. One resource I have available is an Internet operation called Plagiarism.org, which matches submitted work against a data base of previously published material. Do not tempt the gods by copying.

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